Passenger plane hitting World Trade Center tower, NYC, Sept. 11, 2001           

                    (credit: https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/09/10/remembering-                                                    the-september-11th-terrorist-attacks/) 

                                    (credit: David Handschuh, NY Daily News) 

                                             (further citation above) 

                                   9/11: Personal Reflections

I have a number of American friends, some physically in my life off and on, and some online friends whose thoughts I enjoy reading. I identify deeply with the basic premises of America: freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of movement, worship, commerce and markets, and so on. The rejection of titles, kings, and aristocracies. America, this one’s for you.

I didn’t hear about the 9/11 attacks until about 7 a.m. Pacific Time on this day in the calendar twenty three years ago. I was rushed that morning, I had so much to do when I got to school, much of it before our scheduled start time for classes. (No real classes were going to happen.) I didn’t turn on the tv in my home at all.

When I tuned in to my car radio on the way to work, the South Tower had just collapsed. The CBC local radio had switched to CBC’s reporter in New York, who was orally agog. A bad metaphor, but readers know what I mean. The second tower went down while I was trying to do prep work for classes and watching t.v. monitors, which in our new school were all over the building.

I bumped into my old friend and colleague, Jim Holtz, as I was coming out of the photocopying room just a minute before the North Tower’s collapse. Subtle irony. Jim was a draft dodger from Illinois who had come to Canada in 1968 to shun the terrible killing in Viet Nam. We walked upstairs together.

Obviously, he still had a lot of family and friends back in the U.S., though many of them had not talked to him since he’d left for Canada, and, as it turned out, would never talk to him again. He died of cancer in 2017. Best of my colleagues and a gentleman and a scholar in every way. I miss him now, as I write these lines.

Anyway, he was getting misty as we walked and kept glancing at screens. When the North Tower went down – all shown up close and intensely personal, I wept, “What, so now a bunch of innocents have to die for the sins of some politicians in a government most of them don’t even like!” (Yes, I do talk that way.) Jim didn’t weep, but his eyes were moist, and he muttered something like, “Apparently so.” Only that.  

Let me add, my American friends, that a hundred plus Canadians were working in the twin towers that day at that time, and twenty four of them died there. We did feel your pain and still do.

A week later, NYC had a service open to the families and friends of all who had died there. I remember one Canadian woman who went down for that service being interviewed afterward, again by the CBC. She had held onto an American woman who knew she was Canadian, and who had cried to her in anguish, “Why do they hate us so much?!!”

This was in the middle of the worst grief of both of their lives. I think one had lost a husband, the other a son. We have to keep the mitigating factors in mind.

And let’s also keep in mind that over 33,000 people from 230 commercial planes were immediately grounded in Canada. The radio orders were to clear the skies and across that huge space – mid-Atlantic to mid-Pacific and north and south for similar distances, the clearing of the skies by U.S. and Canadian Air Forces was done in about 40 minutes.

6,700 people had to land in Gander, Nfld. alone, a town which existed to service trans-Atlantic flights with fuel and provisions. There were under 10,000 people normally living in Gander, but between homes, schools, churches, etc., the locals took them all in, gave them showers, meals, and beds, and embraced them in their anguish. For about a week. (“Come From Away” is a true story.) Like Ambassador Taylor had done in Tehran with the Americans who had eluded capture when so-called “students” there had seized the U.S. embassy in 1979.

Were Canadians in those cases being warm? Human? Compassionate? Oh, for God’s sake, America! Let your friends love you. Yes, we disagree sometimes. But we live next door. We know you. Often better than you know yourselves. We still like you. A lot, actually.

But my point today is about that Canadian woman at the open service in NYC a week of so after 9/11 and her sharing her grief with her new American friend. Like most Canadians back then, she reacted to “Why do they hate us so much?” with a mixture of bemusement and incredulity. 

The tone of the CBC report on that small incident also implied the Canadian reaction. “Lady, where have you been? Do you know anything about the puppet regimes that America has been propping up in other countries all over since at least Teddy Roosevelt’s times. Saddam Hussein was a CIA boy until he wasn’t. Do you know of Mossadegh’s murder in Iran? The Shah was the CIA’s stooge. Trujillo closer to home? Duvalier? Marcos? Batista right off your coast? Mobutu? Diem?"

And on and on. Even the money that built Hitler’s state was largely from American banks, though, in fairness, not American governments.

But people in foreign lands conflate all Americans. In their view, “regimes is memes and banks, schmanks”. "You’re all in it together," they say.

That’s not the fault of any ordinary citizens going to work today in the U.S., but it does in a subtle way show us why America had to abandon the whole idea of isolationism and why it is simple survival to teach world awareness and history to your children. World leadership, involvement, and responsibility are on you now, like it or lump it. The world’s markets, governments, and cultures are intertwined, and growing more so as I write. You're the one remaining superpower. You can’t ignore the world or even any major part thereof or you’ll pay. Not fair. But real.

This writer needs to stop ranting. This writer needs to calm down.   

What am I trying to say today? Do a lot of people in a lot of places curse the very name “America”? Yes, and partly with sound reasons.

They too are kidding themselves, of course. American governments much of the time were just protecting their citizens. Local populations want American cash and expertise, government and private. And companies especially are not there to watch their investments shrink. They look to whoever locally can bring order out of the chaos, and to be clear, chaos often is what they find. So back a local strong man and get on with mining or logging or whatever. Politics are not our business, say the corporate boards. They are wrong.  

And that’s the heart of the matter. You have to pay attention to the justices and injustices done in your name, my American friends. 

Or maybe, more fairly, I should say, “all my friends in the West”. We like to think we’re the grown ups in this global playground. And to a high degree, we are. Or at least, we should be. We have the material means to make a difference. 

If we’re going to survive, we’re going to have to start acting that way. Adult. Calm. Balanced. Fair. Responsible. Looking to treat our brothers and sisters everywhere like our brothers and sisters everywhere. Not like means to a profit. 

The world has an excess of profit and of stuff. Meaningless junk. Time to turn to each other.

Thoughts on 9/11.

On the other side of some sober thoughts, have a sober day. As you should. And in fairness, as should all of us here in the West.   

                       (Woman covered in dust minutes after first tower collapsed)

                                                        (citation as above) 

         US Secret Service agent carrying woman from the site

(credit: citation as above)